Now You See Me is a collection of powerful personal accounts which bring to light previously undocumented lesbian lives. Jane Traies has been recording the life histories of older women who identify as lesbian for nearly a decade and the narratives in Now You See Me are drawn from this archive of ‘hidden histories’. The stories are told in the women’s own words and vividly recreate a time when being lesbian meant either hiding your true identity or paying the price for breaking society’s rules. The personal is still political in this moving and inspiring book.

‘A pure delight from beginning to end, it tells the stories that we always knew were there but have seldom seen in print. And we have never seen them told quite so beautifully or so honestly. The care and respect that Jane Traies has for her contributors shines through in her insightful editing and the poignant commentary she offers between the stories. This book is an absolute gem.’ – Clare Summerskill

Jane Traies is the author of The Lives of Older Lesbians (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and a number of other publications in the field of ageing and sexuality. As Jay Taverner, she was also joint author of the lesbian historical novels Rebellion, Hearts and Minds and Something Wicked.

Venue: Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham

Damien Le Bas is a rarity – though this is changing – a Romany Traveller who rode and drove ponies, tractors and trucks, who could rocker Romanes (speak Romany) yet went on to study at Christ’s Hospital and Oxford University. From 2011 to 2015 he was the editor of Travellers’ Times,  Britain’s only national magazine for all the Traveller communities.

In The Stopping Places (recently heard on BBC Radio 4) he travels the all over Britain visiting the atchin tans, places were Travelling people used to and sometimes still stop or congregate, from well-known Festivals to Gypsy churches, to semi-secret lanes and commons.

Picture from Appleby Horse Fair

The Traveller worlds are little known and seldom understood by outsiders, yet their numbers include the singer David Essex, the footballer Wayne Rooney, the showjumper Phoebe Buckley, the actor Bob Hoskins… This talk, however, is not about Romany celebs, but about the Traveller world of the past and present.

Venue: in the Bookshop

An agenda-setting, emotionally engaging book on transgender identity.

What does it mean to be transgender? How do we discuss the subject? In this talk, CN Lester, academic and activist, takes us on a journey through some of the most pressing issues concerning the trans debate: from pronouns to Caitlyn Jenner; from feminist and LGBTQ activists, to the rise in referrals for gender variant children – all by way of insightful and moving passages about the author’s own experience. Trans Like Me shows us how to strive for authenticity in a world which often seeks to limit us by way of labels.

‘This personal, powerful and yet humble human testimony makes a vital contribution to a debate that has too often contained more heat than light. I challenge anyone not to have both heart and mind a little more open after reading this book.’ Shami Chakrabarti

Admission: £3, including refreshments. Booking essential through events@fiveleaves.co.uk

In association with Trans Lives East Midlands Project

Nottingham’s second radical bookfair, organised by Five Leaves Bookshop, featuring stalls by national and local publishers, second-hand booksellers and a full supporting programme throughout the day.

Free, with free events. No need to book.

We are grateful for financial support from UNITE (East Midlands region, NG58 branch) towards travel costs for speakers

Speakers/events include:

11.00-12.00

“Diversity in children’s picture books”, with Troy Jenkinson (author of The Best Mummy Snails in the Whole Wide World, an LGBT children’s book) and Latina illustrator Erika Meza

It’s the work, the work, the working life… and how do we organise to make things better? Build the old unions, or create new? The recent long university strike and the success of independent unions in “organising the unorganisable” show what might be possible. Join the discussion with Alan Tuckman (author of Kettling the Unions)

12.15-1.15

Iain McKay on “Modern Science and Anarchy” – the life and work of Peter Kropotkin, prince, anarchist, geographer, whose funeral was the last public anarchist demonstration in Russia under the Bolsheviks

Familiar Stranger: a life between two islands, a memoir by Bill Schwartz and the late Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born cultural theorist, political activist of the New Left, and sociologist

1.30-2.30

Amrit Wilson on Finding a Voice: Asian women in Britain to mark the new edition of this landmark book

Owen Hatherley on his adventures travelling around eleven countries of the former Soviet Union - “Daffodils for Wordsworth. Deprivation for Larkin. A trashed tower block surrounded by a toxic landscape pocked with rust-pitted Ladas in a forgotten oblast 2,000 miles from Moscow for Hatherley.” – Jonathan Meades

2.45-3.45

Singing for Our Lives: Stories from the Street Choirs centres on more than 40 oral histories gathered from members of the UK’s many street choirs, supported by Nottingham Clarion Choir

The Fire Now: anti-racist scholarship in times of explicit racial violence, with Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Azeezat Johnson (editors) and Viji Kuppan (contributor)

4.00-5.00

Paul Hegarty gives a sound-illustrated talk on  Peter Gabriel, singer-songwriter, record producer and activist

Assembly Lines - poetry of the workplace by Jane Commane and Neil Fulwood. Jane runs Nine Arches Press, a poetry specialist press, and her own latest collection is from Bloodaxe. Neil is the author of No Avoiding It, a Nottingham geography of work and class

Stalls from Five Leaves Bookshop, Asylum Magazine (for democratic psychiatry), Radical Routes, Spokesman Books, Ex-Libris (second hand), Northern Herald (second hand), Sparrow’s Nest Archive,  Nottingham People’s Histreh, Jermy and Westerman (second hand), children’s area, Active Distribution, PM Press, AK Press, Nottingham Women’s Centre Library, Morning Star,  Verso, Pluto, Lawrence & Wishart, Left Book Club, Revolutionary Praxis, Dog Section and others

Cafe and bar on site

Full wheelchair access to rooms and facilities

Leaflets/papers. There will be a table for free leaflets and giveaways. We ask people from campaign and other groups to use this space and we don’t want people selling papers inside the events or main hall.  Thanks

The Nottingham Radical Bookfair and related events comprise a private booking. We follow Five Leaves usual policy of open access and free debate across our community but we don’t expect or want to hear or see anything expressing racist or homophobic sentiments or expressing hostility to transgender people or women!

A Nottingham Poetry Exchange event

In 1993, Matvei Yankelevich began publishing the Ugly Duckling zine, which transformed, in the late 1990s, into Ugly Duckling Presse. At UDP, Matvei curates the Eastern European Poets Series . He also co-edited the Emergency Gazette (1998-2002) and 6×6 magazine from 2000-2017.

Matvei is the author of Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square), the poetry collection Alpha Donut (United Artists), the novella-in-fragments Boris by the Sea (Octopus), and several chapbooks.

He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (for translation) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (for poetry).

His translations of Daniil Kharms were collected in Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms(Ardis/Overlook) and received praise from the TLS, the Guardian, the New York Times, and elsewhere. His co-translation (with Eugene Ostashevsky) of Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB) received the National Translation Award in 2014.

His critical writing includes essays on Conceptual Poetry (LA Review of Books) and on Russian-American poetry (Octopus). He edited a portfolio of Contemporary Russian Poetry and Poetics for the magazine Aufgabe (No. 8, Fall 2009). Matvei teaches for the Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn

(Matvei Yankelevitch’s reading was announced last year but had to be postponed because of the University and College Union strike as he is lecturing locally while visiting)

Matvei will be joined by

Nasser Hussain is a Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at Leeds Beckett University. His first book, boldface was published by Burning Eye Books in 2014, and his new book SKY WRI TEI NGS was published by Coach House Books this year. Nasser has had a number of occupations: treeplanter, wilderness guide, amateur restaurateur, and now academic and poet. He likes his new job best. For him, poems are best described as ‘language with a pattern’, and much of his recent practice takes pleasure in finding new patterns to wonder at. SKY WRI TEI NGS is the first expression of a larger interest in mass transit, and is his attempt to find a literal and poetic intersection between two things that ‘move’ us (in this case, planes and poems).

Here’s Nasser reading: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVWH7WQ7SWA

Jo Dixon is a poet and critic living in Nottingham. Her poems have appeared in New Walk, The Interpreter’s House and Furies: A Poetry Anthology of Women Warriors (For Books’ Sake), In Transit: Poems of Travel (The Emma Press) and South Bank Poetry. Her debut poetry pamphlet: A Woman in the Queue, was published by Melos Press in May 2016. 

Admission: £3 including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Kehinde Andrews explores the true roots of this tradition, and connects the dots to today’s struggles by showing what a renewed politics of Black radicalism might look like in the 21st century.

Kehinde Andrews is one of the leading Black political voices in Britain. He is associate professor in sociology at Birmingham City University, a regular writer of opinion pieces for the Guardian, Independent and Ebony magazine, and editor of the series ‘Blackness in Britain’. He was part of the team that launched the first Black Studies degree in Europe, and is Co-chair of the Black Studies Association.

Admission: £3, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Five Leaves’ book group is open to all. You are free to attend one meeting per lifetime, every meeting or all stops in between. All we ask is that you read the book in advance. You don’t have to get it from us, library users are welcome, but we offer 15% off book club books in the lead up to the event. The author will not be present!

Nobody can leave an island. An island is a cosmos in a nutshell, where the stars slumber in the grass beneath the snow. But occasionally someone tries . . .

At the start of the twentieth century Ingrid Barrøy is born on an island that bears her name – a holdfast for a single family, their livestock, their crops, their hopes and dreams. Her father dreams of building a quay that will connect them to the mainland, but closer ties to the wider world come at a price. Her mother has her own dreams – more children, a smaller island, a different life – and there is one question Ingrid must never ask her.

Island life is hard, a living scratched from the dirt or trawled from the sea, so when Ingrid comes of age, she is sent to the mainland to work for one of the wealthy families on the coast. But Norway too is waking up to a wider world, a modern world that is capricious and can be cruel. Tragedy strikes, and Ingrid must fight to protect the home she thought she had left behind.

The Follower was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and is translated from Norwegian.

Five Leaves book group is free to attend and refreshments are provided. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Sorry – for personal reasons Neil has had to postpone this – watch out for a new date in February

This is a history of hominids, hunters and herders; of emperors and slaves; of patriarchs and women; of rich and poor; of dictators and revolutionaries. From the ancient empires of Persia and Rome to the Russian Revolution, the Vietnam War, and the 2008 Crash, this is a history of greed and violence, but also of solidarity and resistance.

Many times in the past, a different society became an absolute necessity. Humans have always struggled to create a better life. This history proves that we, the many, have the power to change the world.

Neil Faulkner is a historian and archaeologist. He is the author of numerous books, including A Radical History of the World (Pluto, 2018), A People’s History of the Russian Revolution (Pluto, 2017) and Lawrence of Arabia’s War (Yale, 2016). This will be Neil’s third talk at the bookshop. There will be plenty time for discussion.

Admission: £3, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

A Nottingham Poetry Society event, with readers Cathy Grindrod and Jan Norton

Admission: £4 (£1 to members of NPS)

Nancy Campbell combines memoir, scientific and cultural history with a bewitching account of landscape and place, which will appeal to readers of Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin and Olivia Laing. 

Nancy Campbell reads from her latest book which combines memoir, scientific and cultural history with a bewitching account of landscape and place. As Writer in Residence at the world’s northernmost museum – at Upernavik in Greenland – during the dark weeks of midwinter Campbell was able to experience first-hand the changing life of Arctic coastal communities. Captivated by the solid yet impermanent nature of ice, by its stark, rugged beauty, she then set out to explore it in all its facets. From the Bodleian Library archives to the traces left by polar expeditions, from the first Greenlandic libraries to the curling rinks of Kinross, her new book examines the impact of ice on our lives at a time when it is itself under threat from climate change.

Carol Rowntree Jones will introduce, chair and be in discussion with Nancy

The Library of Ice is a beautifully rendered evocation of the interplay of people and their environment on a fragile planet, and of a writer’s quest to define the value of books in a changing world.

Nancy is a poet, essayist and art critic who read here in 2014 – then with early poems, some in Greenlandic, which were published in her debut collection Disko Bay (shortlisted for the Forward Prize 2016). Her reading was memorable.

Admission: £4, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk.

I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhood                                                                              and found it a queendom, a wild queendom

Liz Berry will be reading from her new collection The Republic of Motherhood or, rather, singing the body electric, from the joy and anguish of becoming a new mother to the darkest hours and brightest days. She will also be reprising her earlier collection Black Country.

This pamphlet length work was this year’s Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem

Liz is one of the best readers of poetry in the Midlands

Liz will be joined by Ann Gray, winner of the Smith/Doorstep pamphlet competition for I Wish I Had More Mothers.

Would having more mothers make the loss of one less painful?  Following her mother on her dementia journey, Ann Gray shows us that in the chaos there can also be tenderness, humour and love.

Admission: £3 including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

                                                                                        Graham Jones works for Proper Music. His first book, The Last Shop Standing, chronicled the decline of the record shop and celebrated our own Selectadisc and Arcade Records. He’s back with the story of vinyl, that scratchable, oversized and unlikely commodity which is back in fashion big time.

He explains why we have more than a hundred more record shops than we had in 2009, and how others have gained the reward from their hard work. Budget turntables, manufacturers, supermarkets, chain stores, clothes shops, pressing plants and even the government are amongst the many who have benefited from their efforts. Graham Jones has spent 32 years travelling the UK selling to independent record shops and visited more record shops than any other human. This sound-illustrated talk guides you round the record shops of the UK who sell new vinyl. He has gathered some fascinating and funny anecdotes told him by much-loved record shop staff so that when you visit you will feel like you already know the characters behind the counters.

£4 admission, including refreshments. £3 to anyone carrying a piece of vinyl music. £2 if you have a rarity to show off! Let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

2017 saw Catalonia come under the world’s spotlight as it again fought for independence and the preservation and protection of its unique Catalan culture. Answering the questions and complications behind the fight for Catalonian Independence, this talk is a guide to the region’s political, historical and cultural issues. For the lay person as well as the expert, it takes the reader through the rich history of Catalonia – its language, culture and political background – to the present day, covering defining eras of the region from Franco’s dictatorship to the 2017 independence referendum and elections.

Chris will also look at what could happen now, in Catalonia and in Spain, following the impasse between the two countries.

Chris Bambery wrote Catalonia Reborn with George Kerevan. His People’s History of Scotland has just been republished in a revised edition.

Admission: £3 including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk.

We are pleased to again welcome a team of creative writers from Japan as part of the Japan Now arts project.

Readings will be in Japanese and English.

Full programme and ticketing arrangements to be announced

States of Independence is a book festival in a day, attended by several hundred people, featuring around 25 stalls and 25 events, organised by Five Leaves and the Creative Writing Team at De Montfort University.

All events are free and unticketed. There are usually readings, book launches, industry panels – all from the world of independent presses, independent writing, independent thinking.

Come for an hour or come for all day.

We have a cafe on site and all the events are free.

Advance notice of Nottingham Poetry Festival. Readings by well known poets, poetry in pubs, poetry in performance. Bookfair.

Full programme to follow

Five Leaves is pleased to work with the RCN (Royal College of Nursing) trade union to celebrate nurses’ day.

Full details to follow